When I was in high school and I said I wanted to be a writer, almost nobody took seriously the possibility that I might succeed, including me. I fantasized, of course, about becoming famous, but when I was honest with myself, I couldn’t imagine I had anything to say that people would actually want to read. So now, when I look at the books I have published, I marvel at, and am humbled by, the fact that I have become what I said I wanted to be when I grew up, something that most people I know cannot say. I am not famous, at least not the way I imagined I might be when I was a kid, and I don’t need to be. People read my books. I know they do because they tell me about it, and while I would be lying if I said I didn’t want more people to read them, or if I said I didn’t want more critics to pay attention to what I have to say — because I, of course, think that what I have to say should command such attention — the truth is that my ego is not what matters. What I have to say, after all, might turn out to be, in the larger scope of things, profoundly insignificant. What matters is that my books find their way to the readers in whose lives they can make a difference, which I am gratified to say they have been doing. And that’s enough.
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